I don’t use facebook myself, but I know a lot of you (and your readers) do, so today I’ve added a new Facebook Like button to GetSocial Live. As always, it’s WordPress.com compatible, but will also work on other websites. What do you think?

Try it:

You can add the new button to each of your posts, and whoever clicks on it will see the title of the post, a like counter and some pictures of his friends who liked it too.

What else?
GetSocial is totally free. If you like it, please consider a donation. Thanks!

Take two cups of Facebook share, add a spoonful of twitter and two quarts of no respect for peoples privacy and you’ll get Google Buzz.

How to Generate a Google Buzz Button for WordPress.com?I’ve added a new feature to GetSocial Live: you can now use it to generate Google Buzz buttons for your WordPress.com blog!

Try It (It’s alpha transparent and will work on all types of backgrounds):

The button is routed through Google Reader. it’s a temporary solution until a better API for Google Buzz becomes available. Get yours now!

For the best results, you should use your permalink (instead of shortlink) when you generate Google Buzz buttons. The reason for this is that the source of the link is extracted from your post URL. If you’ll use the shortlink GetSocial will not be able to extract the name of your blog. Instead, it will assign WordPress.com as the source for your link (the link itself will work fine, and correctly connect to your post though).

What is Google Buzz?Google Buzz is a new service from Google. it was launched a few days ago, and is probably intended to compete with twitter. You can post text and images there, comment, ‘like’ and follow/unfollow people. It’s a hybrid between the Facebook share feature (which automatically fetches images and other information from your posted links) and Twitter (excluding its famous 140 characters limitation).

What’s Wrong With Google Buzz?
Google Buzz was integrated into Gmail, so it’s already got a huge user base. That’s also one of my problems with it – I think that Google Buzz is imposing itself on Gmail users, and that’s just ain’t right. Also, many Gmail users found themselves ‘following’ (and being ‘followed’ by) random people who Google Buzz have automatically selected from their email contacts. This was done without them even using the new service! That’s bad for privacy, and also not particularly fun – do you really want to find out that you’ve been “following” your ex?

But wait, it gets even worse: since you can click through to other people’s profiles and see who they follow and who follows them, you can (at least in this early stage) deduce who they’ve been exchanging emails with – and again, that’s without them even using the service! I’ve personally found out the secret identity of an anonymous blogger using this method.

The thing that really amazes me about Google Buzz though, is its name. What’s going on here? Doesn’t Yahoo already have a service called Yahoo Buzz? Am I the only one to notice that? ‘Like’? ‘Follow’? I think we’ve seen all this stuff somewhere else already…

In my opinion Google Buzz, like GTalk and Google Wave before it, was designed to keep you connected to your Google account for as much as possible so that Google could phish (and keep, forever) even more personal information about your browsing habits and use it for targeting ads. But hey, that’s just me.

GetSocial Live users might have noticed some new updates recently (better tooltips, interactive previews). Since it’s much easier to update a website than it is to update an application, GSL users can expect a much more rapid rate of new developments! So if you think of some new features you’d like to see in GSL, do tell :)

Some updates (on the domain side) require scheduled downtime, and that’s why I’ve recently created this Twitter account as an independent source for updates about GSL upgrades, new versions and maintenance downtime. Needless to say, it’s a 100% spam free twitter account – so go ahead, start following GetSocial Live now!

If we’re already talking about downtime, some of you may have noticed that GetSocial Live was unavailable at times during the last few weeks. The reason for this, is that GetSocial Live was hosted (for free) on Google Pages. When the service suddenly shut down, GetSocial Live became unavailable. Migrating to Google Sites (the successor of Google Pages) was impractical because you can’t run HTML files directly from Google Sites, and that’s why GSL went down. Currently, GSL is temporarily hosted on a paid host, but will soon migrate to a permanent location (still paid though). I apologize in advance for any resulting downtime, and will try to provide alternative links via the GSL Twitter as needed.

GetSocial is now a web service!
It works with PC, Mac & Linux and no download is required:

getsociallive.com

I’ve just launched a new (and very special) version of GetSocial:GetSocial Live is a web service that generates script-less social bookmarking toolbars for your WordPress.com blog. It’s fast, extremely easy to use and absolutely free!

Here’s an example of what you’ll get:

GetSocial for Mac
GetSocial Live is similar to good ol’ GetSocial, but it offers only the basic functionality of the Windows application. On the other hand, it’s got some huge benefits too:

1. GetSocial Live supports every OS and every web browser (Mac users, this time I totally came through for you!).

2. No download is required.

3. GetSocial Live will be centrally updated (so you will always use the latest version).

How can you help?
GetSocial is free, but manufacturing and maintaining it sure isn’t!

You can help by donating (even in Euros and Pounds) – Contributors of 25 USD or more will receive a 50 USD worth* promotional Google AdWords coupon code for free!

If you like (or even if you just use) GetSocial – tell your friends about it! Post about GetSocial/GetSocial Live, add getsociallive.com to your blogroll, share getsociallive.com via social networks and generally let people know that there is a new social bookmarking service in town!

Known issues:
‘Copy to clipboard’ will only work with IE. FF and chrome users need to right-click and copy the code manually…